VEEHAEEEN
VEEON
within the limits of his ideals. He was
one of the founders of the Brussels Free
University, which was to liberate the higher
education of Belgian youth from clerical
control ; and he was appointed Adminis
trator of it. He stipulated that he should
have a secular funeral. D. 1862.
YERHAEREN, Emile, Belgian poet. B. May 21, 1855. Ed. Ste. Barbe College, Ghent, and Louvain University. Verhaeren was a fellow pupil of Maeterlinck at Ghent. His father, a pious and wealthy Catholic, had him trained in law, and he was called to the Bar in 1881. He abandoned law for literature, and in 1883 published Les flamandes. Fine as Verhaeren s verse was, he was little known in England until 1914, when the War drove him across the sea. He was then honoured by the universities of England, Scotland, and Wales, and in its obituary notice the Annual Register observes that he was " Belgium s most famous poet " and " the greatest exponent in European poetry of universal ideas." He wrote forty volumes of lyric and dithyrambic verse, and a few plays and monographs on artists. Intense humani tarian earnestness is united with great beauty of diction in his poetry, giving it exceptional power. In Les moines (1886) Verhaeren gave the world clearly to under stand that he had left Catholicism. He tells the monks : " You alone survive from the Christian world that is dead " ; and he calls them " seekers of sublime chimaeras." Most of his poetry breathes a fiery Eation- alism. In later years he seemed anxious to recover some vague form of religion, but it is little removed from Agnosticism. He
says :
La nature parait sculpter Un visage nouveau a son
See Stefan Zweig s Emile Verhaeren (Eng.
trans., 1910). D. Nov. 27, 1916.
YERNES, Professor Maurice, D.D.,
French Biblical critic. B. Sep. 28, 1845. Ed. Montauban and Strassburg University. Son of a Protestant minister, Vernes
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graduated in theology and became a
minister. He adopted liberal ideas, edited
the Revue du Christianisme Liberal for
some years, and co-operated in a French
translation of the Bible. In 1879 he
was, despite the protests of the orthodox,
appointed professor of Protestant theology
at Paris University, and in the following
year Director of Studies at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes. He translated into French
Tiele s History of Religion (1885) and
various works of Kuenen, and was one of
the founders of the Revue de I histoire des
religions. His opinions (Les resultats de
I exegese biblique, 1890 ; Essais bibliques,
1891 ; etc.) passed the bounds of liberal
Christianity, and in his later years he wag-
Vice-President of the French National
Association of Freethinkers. He sent a
message of warm support to the Eome
Congress of Freethinkers in 1904.
YERNET, Emile Jean Horace, French painter. B. June 30, 1789. He was taught by his father, a painter of distinc tion, and in 1811 he began to illustrate magazines. In 1822 he sent to the Salon a series of pictures of Napoleon s battles. They were, of course, rejected out of fear of the reactionary authorities, but Vernet scored a great success by privately exhibi ting them. He never yielded to the clerical- royalist pressure of the new regime. In 1826 he became a member of the Institut, and in 1827 Director of the French Academy at Eome. At the accession of Louis Philippe he returned to Napoleonic pictures. In 1842 he was attracted to Eussia to paint pictures for the Tsar. Vernet is recognized as a painter of high rank, who, however, produced too much and too rapidly. He \vas a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and he was awarded the Grand Medal at the Exhi bition of 1855. D. Jan. 17, 1863.
YERON, Professor Eugene, French
writer. B. May 29, 1825. Ed. Ecole
Normale. He was appointed professor of
rhetoric at Paris University in 1850, but
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